Tuesday 25th October 2011

The Gay Mother has regained her country fastness (terrible flies on the windowsills); Florence is over.

On Sunday we toiled to Santa Maria Novella but it was shut; but instead blossomed an exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi, ‘Beauty and Money: Botticelli, the Medicis and Savonarola’. The Gay Mother spied it on the way back from the SMN catastrophe and insisted. Well, what a stroke of luck! Turned out to be just up the PLRG street: Money and Beauty, Beauty and Money. I’ll tell you all about it.

As Maria said, ‘When God shuts a door, he opens a window somewhere else.’

That’s The Sound of Music.

In the meantime, here are some more graphs of Renaissance buildings.  I hope you see. In spirit, the Renaissance led straight to the Poor Little Rich Gays. The accompanying Classical revival in architectural was also essential. That’s why I thought: so much better to be on the Ponte Vecchio looking downstream to the Ponte  Trinità  than on the Ponte  Trinità looking upstream to the Ponte Vecchio. See graphs below if you can’t grasp…

Much Better to be on Ponte Vecchio Looking Downstream at Exquisite Rhythms of Ponte Trinità Than on Ponte Trinità Looking Upstream at Nooky Ponte Vecchio

Better to be on Ponte Vecchio Looking Downstream at Ponte Trinità Than on Ponte Trinità Looking at Nooky Wooky Olde Worlde Medieval Ponte Vecchio

Cloisters at Santa Croce, by Brunelleschi: One of the First Renaissance Structures: A Little Plain and Small-Scale for Some PLRGs But at Least not Gothic Muddle that Immediately preceded

Complex, Graceful, Grand, Far from Normal: Michelangelo's Staircase to the Laurentian Library, One of the First to be Free in the Room Like This: Bruce MacBain Has Slaved for Many Hours with Staircases: They are Incredibly Detailed and PLRG: There was a Lot of Trouble with Reggie Cresswell's Staircase: Had to Start Again! £12,000

Sunday 23^rd October 2011

I’m on a visit to Florence with the Gay Mother. We’re in a flatti just off Via Tornabuoni which was rather smelly to begin with but has responded superbly to vigorous airing as well as a list of suggestions to the owners (‘Get that sofa vac-ed and sprayed’). The Gay Mother has washed up abroad for the first time in 60 years, if ever. I don’t think she camped or villa-ed in her life, she always hotel-ed, even in her twenties, in the 40s.

I’ll tell you all about apartment life another time. You should definitely take one too in Rome, Venice, Florence or Paris. You can get the full hotel effect, more or less, for half the price with four times the space, the Prada shop downstairs to be included in the start-of-day drive for morning goods and all the glamour of residency.

I’ve got fashion tips coming up. Poor Little Rich Gays must suddenly brace after this late fine weather for autumn and winter modes. Florence is a tiny little place. Just imagine going into Colchester or Chipping Camden and finding Prada, Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Chanel, Burberry and Dolce e Gabbana. I’ve learnt so much.

What I’m thinking: Is this where the Poor Little Rich Gays started?  Is this why instinctively we home in on Tuscany? Have you heard of the Renaissance? It was an awfully good idea and started in about the 1400s. Everyone got out from under the grim thumb of God and thought:  we’re rather marvellous, so clever and capable, let’s order the world for our own delight rather than God’s. Hence, harmonious classical architecture on a human scale revived (but much more fuss to do), art celebrating the human form, expressive, full of colour and lavishness. Entrepreneurs sprang up: the Medicis were bankers in Florence who made a pile and ordered art like the Multis. I must find out more about them. Were they PLRG? I’ve heard they could be rather difficult.

It could just be that the path leading to the Poor Little Rich Gays, who are an ornamental end in themselves, began in the Renaissance. The Middle Ages, with madrigals, those pastry-people being punished you see in paintings and nooky, wooky, beamy wiggly chambers, we just couldn’t have taken.

We went to the Laurentian Library here in Florence; it’s of classical design, architect, Michelangelo. This is the beginning of getting it right, not just cramming in for quaint effect in the medieval manner. In the entrance hall the space was too high and too narrow; the perfectly balanced classical design could not quite be achieved. Michelangelo had to quietly bend the rules; oh the detail and the thought! He had outsize scrolls low down to draw the eye away from the excessive height. In the corners there’s some colliding of elements (see graph below) but better this than shrink the entire design out of proportion.

I see a direct line of descent to Bruce MacBain, my private architect, instructing a Polish builder as to the tiling module in a Poor Little Rich Gay bathroom. Indeed once Bruce fitted elegantly three toilets under stairs in a house in Hampstead, in one of which a millionairess got stuck.

Yesterday we took Benozzo Gozzoli The Adoration of the Magi at the Palazzo Ricardo Medici, another Medici-funded artwork of the Renaissance. Do you know it?   Adoration of the Magi, it may be, but really a joyous parade of fabrics, headgear, equestrian accoutrements, turquoise bootees and fantasy animals going all round the walls of the chapel where it is found . Various Medicis have got themselves put in. There are Dalmatians but their spots are fleur-de-lys arranged in rows.

Worldly, costly, riotous, showy, a little bit silly, gorgeous, Renaissance – full of life and wonder, like the Poor Little Rich Gays.

Michelangelo's Laurentian Library, Florence

Michelangelo Solves Space Problem in Staircase Entrance Hall of Laurentian Library, Florence. My Own Architect, Bruce MacBain, Would Have Done the Same

Benozzo Gozzoli: One of the Three Wise Men in Poor Little Rich Gay Style

Benozzo Gozzoli: So Called Adoration of the Magi: What Fabrics!

Friday 21^st October 2011

The Gay Mother and I are just back from Fiesole (driven up by a private Italian), trying to find where Cousin Paquita’s grandparents lived in 1911 on the hills somewhere below. They were Battenclaus of New York. All their things were taken by the Germans in 1944, save a silk Persian rug. What became of them, we don’t know.

What a test for Poor Little Rich Gays were all our things to be taken by the enemy! But we would begin again and reweave better than many, I feel sure.

Oh the view on this day so clear all shapes spring into another dimension of strange incontrovertible stillness! None of the smudgy haze of high summer. I’ve spoken before of the ancient Tuscan landscape, anchored through art, consisting only of olive trees, umbrella pines, cypresses and vines, grey and green. Looking down from Fiesole, we saw farms and villas, a rural idyll with the thundering civilisation of Florence beyond. Later, descending, in a tiny country lane lined with high stone walls where the Battenclaus might have lived, we saw again Lucy Honeychurch and the Edwardian foreigner’s vision of rus in urbe at Florence. Further down, the lane opened out and merged with the modern town.

In the Spring I visited Rome and was dismayed by the boil-washed tourist masses. I wanted the old picturesque run-down Rome back as I knew it first in the 1970s. Rome, Florence and especially Tuscany have saved Poor Little Rich Gays from sheer idiocy. My God! We could have been at Portofino or a like resort preferred by second-rate, merely rich Gays such as Robin Smallmeal, head of landfill in that country or whatever.

Poor Little Rich Gays have got love of Tuscany. It’s a minefield, so difficult to get right. There’s a book of more than usually revolting sentimentality called La Bella Tuscany written by a woman from San Francisco about doing up a house at Cortona.

We can’t have that. Tuscany preciousness.

When first known by me in 1974, Tuscany was rare, rural, secluded, poor, top-quality and important: its landscape is not a bit as nature left it, utterly lovely and an ideal. All other country districts are a poor substitute. Unfortunately neither Botticelli nor Piero della Francesco penetrated Gloucestershire.

Now, we don’t want it changing but we can’t be harping on the past either. If Poor Little Rich Gays are not in the vanguard of renewal and revolution, then who is?

Mercifully they’ve got Florence just right. I’ve not stayed here overnight for twenty years and was convinced it was utterly gone, a heritage pen seething with tour groups. Well, it isn’t. We’re in a flat just off Via Tornabuoni, right in the centre. There are excellent local shops, schoolchildren, well-dressed passers-by with attack. Only the Uffizi we’ve had to jettison. A milling mass, horrible barn-like room, new in the last thirty years, where they show the Botticellis. But much else remains: we’ve paid many calming, lovely visits, with only a few distinguished other visitors. Come back later to hear.

The View from Fiesole

Where Cousin Paquita's Parents Might have Lived in 1911: Via Boccaccio, Going up to Fiesole

Wednesday 19^th October 2011

This Florence apartemento is coming on. I’ve suggested adjustments. They’ve been in and sprayed the sofa to improve its smell. Just now, I shook the bedcover out the window over world-class shoppers in via Tornabuoni below – with some result.

But the Gay Mother, 87, insists all the designer shops are empty; she’s down on the Uffizi too. Nevertheless, miracles have occurred.

The other day, at the Gala for 25 years of La Pont de la Tour, Laura Malcolm announced that her son, Ivor Driver, has got a job. What a relief! In this climate. Ivor had appeared blasé and expressed an indifference to brand management work. His parents feared that this might have protruded at the interview. But it didn’t.  Now he will thrust forth and ascend to greatness and wealth, like his father before him.

I was slightly furious as well as relieved. What a mercy not to be 23 with the drear slope of work yet to climb. At the other end of the scale, as it were, we hear that the Blond Multi is to ‘step down’ from his post in the business which he richly sold a few years ago. Complete departure for a re-think at Christmas.

What will he do with the days? He might even be driven to resume piano lessons and attempt Grade 2.

Poor Little Rich Gays must have goals. My! how they work. I was going to say, while at the same time loathing it, but that would not quite be true. Poor Little Rich Gays are rewarded but not pompous. They do not forget the grave. But they crave relief from the burden while knowing that nothingness is the alternative.

Tuesday 18^th October 2011

I’ve gained Florence with the Gay Mother. The apartemento, off via Tournaboni, in fact right above Gucci, does not smell as much of money as I would like.

I’ve ordered intense vac-ing, beating and shaking out. So far, nothing’s happened.

But my back-log is so drastic, I’ve reached Florence only in fact.

Last week, Robert Nevil and I took a trip down memory lane. We went back to our old London Uni where Reggie Cresswell gave a discussion about his ceramic. Joshua Baring, who is to be cured of asymmetrical rheumatoid arthritis in the foot, but still only 27, we took as ballast against complete engulfment in the former times.

Young friends keep you young, you hope.

Reggie’s ceramic is about the past and how it evaporates but remains.

I expect you’re surprised I ever went near a uni. Well, I did. But never again, I’d say. The scholarly life not for me. Awfully drear.  I can’t bear to spend more than ten minutes in consideration…

In a corridor we met a present student from the Sudan who was lost. ‘Follow us,’ we said. ‘We were here 35 years ago. We know the way.’

And we did.

After the lecture we were entertained in the department Common Room. I pointed out the spot where Doctor Mun had stood before all the students and condemned Virginia Woolf, causing an outrage amongst the women. His manner from his 40s was death-bed with rare devastating utterances issuing there from. It was his Memorial Lecture that Reggie gave.

It was quite different in those days. We fraternised wickedly with the dons. Now we could sue. I used to go round to Dr Mun’s flat and Windolene his Hockney. Robert Nevil became intensely intimate.

One thing though – I always thought our uni was second-rate, even dismal. But it appears that all the time it was top-ranked in the world and has been ever since.

To end on an even cheerier note, there were a few old friends of Dr Mun’s there whom I could have sworn were dead.

But they weren’t!

To come: how at last, after 30 years, I gave a dinner not riven with nerves; I meditate on the toad,work; Eddie Sedgewick showed artwork in a highly-wrought jacket; and there’ll be Florence, with the Gay Mother.

We’ve been here a day

Saturday 15th October 2011

The Gay Mother has gained First Class from the Country. On Monday we board for Florence. There was no tea or coffee service to the seat in the train, only vouchers for the buffet (pronounced bu.u.fay).

This year I took one dinner, on Tuesday, at Shoreditch House  for Frieze Art Fayre, saw Grayson in a Mourning Doll Get-Up of black net, met a Peter Doig-owning psychologist who knows the Multis and took an exceptional interest in their passion for La Pont.  It was their attendance there, at the Paul Bocuse Celebrity Chef cook-in or cook-off and consequent restraint from the  Frieze  dinner that allowed me  to represent them.

I failed utterly to see any Art in the entire course of the week. Perhaps this is the purest form of attendance at Frieze Art Fayre. I didn’t even gain Trenton’s Gallery for the private view there before the dinner, let alone the plastic tent in Regent’s Park where the main Fayre takes place. Instead, passing in my Official Car with Xenon driving lights this morning, on the way to newly-pinned Val’s as a matter of fact,  I saw Art Types crossing the road, unmistakably going to and coming from the Art event. One lady was in a knitted mushroom frock severely ridged in hoops from top to bottom so that she resembled Zebedee from ‘The Magic Roundabout’. Her boots were high and bronze in hue.

At Shoreditch House the dinner was excellent. It was a recession-style buffet with queue but a huge improvement the at table service of takeaway-type food last time.  I agreed with the financial brains behind Trenton’s Gallery that I should spend £40 million on Art in my role as representative of the Multis. She invoiced them the next day.

Freshly-pinned-at-the-hip Val said today in his best Noel Coward manner: ‘This Liam Fox and Mr Wherrity – where they terribly in love?’ He was unmixing a bag of mixed nuts, jam-jars lined up, and planning a banana bread with pecans.

Grayson in Black

Monday 10th October 2011

Last week, Laura Malcolm and I were the Multis’ plus ones (free of charge) at the gala  10-canapés-a-minute plus never-before-drunk exclusive Lanson blend to celebrate 20 years of La Pont de la Tour. La Pont, hard by London’s landmark Tower Bridge, is the Multis’ ‘local’. Under escort of high-ranking Pont staff,  who adore the Multis for their outrage, boldness, cufflinks, complaints and frequent attendance, we are taken briefly next door to Cantina, a less-market mass restaurant, but also Conran-owned and also celebrating – but with fake snow, a nude boy and girl, save for fur coats and swimming trunks, and slappy, rough ‘bites’, possibly even frankfurters. The atmosphere was of a Montana cowboy dive. I can’t be sure but there might have been gingham.

We were enchanted but couldn’t stay, of course. Our path back to the carpets, foie gras, jus and rare venison of La Pont was already carved, somehow.

The Multis are so intimate at La Pont but as with all that is deeply loved there is much fault. Captain Blond Multi almost always gives notes whenever I have accompanied him there. Sometimes the bill is adjusted. This time, dining in the restaurant after the gala, he persuaded them to let him have chateaubriand for one not two as the menu dictated, then sent it back as over-cooked, which it was. I suppose the kitchen had a second go with the lopped off other half.

Some say: ‘Surely the Multis’ food is spat in behind the scenes.’ But no, they are wrong. Captain Blond is always the pure essence of diplomacy. He has shaped and improved restaurants and hotels here and throughout the world.

In Romania the week before last we took a 3-hour pony and cart ride through the Transylvanian forests.  In Prada and other accessories, we encountered charcoal burners of direst poverty. ‘Look at their kitchen-diner!’ I mocked. See graph below. Mrs Charcoal-Burner was preparing food in a handleless shovel. On a slate over a camp fire was roasting an aubergine. We took many graphs and finally Mr Charcoal-Burner raged out of the old bus or railway carriage that seemed to be their bedroom and demanded money. We gave him £3.50. ‘I’m going to put them in a magazine,’ Angus said. Later he remarked: ‘I wonder what she was going to do with that aubergine. Maybe it was something new. I wish we could have stayed to see.’

Romanian Charcoal-Burners: Their Kitchen-Diner: Can You See the Aubergine?Woodland Stop: Transylvania

Romanian Charcoal-Burners: £99 on Flowers

Romanian Charcoal-Burners: Shovel Cooking

La Pont de la Tour Gala Scene

Fake Snow at Cantina 20 Year Celebration

Furs and Swimming Trunks: Novelty Entertainment at 20 Years of Cantina and La Pont Gala

Wednesday 5th October 2011

We were talking about the phenomenon, at first sight odd, of Poor Little Rich Gay involvement in the former Communist countries of the Central and Eastern of Europe.

But, as you’ll see, it’s more of an intervention than a visit.

The international food writer and stylist took his 50th birthday in a cow stall in Romania. The central commemoration dinner was ordered in and offered in the cow stall  at Prince Charles’s Viscri guesthouse. Of filthy food taken in the bloc over the years, (Anthony Mottram’s mother, on gaining the aeroplane after the Bulgarian Orphans, exclaimed, ‘At last – clean food’), this was at the better end. A wholesome light chicken broth with vegetables and pasta ribbons only a little over-cooked, was followed by well-steamed cabbage parcels with possible pork and offal contents… then coffee. As Merle Barr pointed out the next day when the 15 euro a head price was announced, several courses appeared to be missing. There was a special occasion cake, though. Charlie Hurling said, ‘I’m getting Febreze.’ His partner, Archie Brahams, considered the sponge to have formerly been the back-seat of a Ford Cortina.

Guests were asked to pay tribute to Angus on his 50th Birthday: Charlie Hurling said, ‘It’s been a joy – except in 1997.’  ‘What happened then?’ we asked. ‘I’ve not forgotten,’ said Charlie. ‘You didn’t come to my 40th in India,’ Angus said resentfully.  ‘That was because my mother had just died,’ Charlie said and did a drama of breaking down: ‘Thank you for reminding me.’  (Sob! Sob!) The food writer, Judi Dench, praised as follows: ‘You were hell to work with but I’m glad I kept the friendship.’  I said, ‘Angus has shaped and re-styled world and made it a better place than when found.’

Of course he’s hell to work with.

The next night, he somehow secured a barn and an outdoor kitchen. This is what I mean by making inroads. These facilities were  in someone’s private garden. The owner’s veg patch and freezer were forthcoming with tomatoes, aubergine and beetroot as well as goulash pork. Angus, in command in the outdoor kitchen, then re-modelled the Romanian National Dish, yoking it for the first time with rice. The owner, who dined, when not hovering with a bucket of water for fear of the candles that had been styled into the intensely wooden and dry barn, was stunned but accepting.

The Romanian Barn Dinner for the Second Night

Angus Willis's Outdoor Romanian Kitchen for the Second Night

Angus Willis: Food Styling in Romanian Outdoor Kitchen

Monday 3rd October 2011

I’m so behind. This hot weather has induced sluggishness. Yesterday I drove out with hip- pinned Val to Ewelme, Oxfordshire, where no teashop was forthcoming. Today I was at Princess Anne’s hairdresser’s memorial where Princess Alexandra mingled charmingly at the after-party. She is purely Royal, you know, unlike the Queen. Not a drop of unpurple blood.  There was a sticky moment when one of the speakers claimed before all that the other princess (who was not present) never paid for her coiffures.  On Saturday eight dined at my Official home for my birthday.

It’s all been wonderful and poignant.

So back to Romania, where Poor Little Rich Gays remained absolutely themselves, despite, or perhaps because of, the reduced circumstances.

The Poor Little Rich Gay connection with the Central and Eastern of Europe, the former bloc, indeed the bloc itself (yes, I was there, as was Anthony Mottram) goes back to 1987.

You remember the Bulgarian Orphans?

Former bloc is different, isn’t it? Not the obvious choice. Also, it gives opportunities to make inroads, as you shall see, although the greatest have been made by Anthony Mottram who is personally so much responsible for the new bloc we see today.

The actual birthday dinner was held in a semi-outdoor cow stall, with mud floor, at Prince Charles’s Guesthouse  in Viscri. Some unknown English middle-classes, who happened also to be staying, had to be included. Mrs Middle-Class tried to propose a loyal toast, without success, possibly to drown out Charlie Hurling’s raging account of gastric banding, the flaps of flesh to the knee that curtain the formerly obese  and one whose diet was sucking on food and spitting it out.

Well, we could try that.

At the memorial for Princess Anne’s hairdresser today the best speaker recalled how he and P Anne’s H did imitations of their mutual clients and were felled with hilarity: ‘Moments that can never be recaptured or understood by anyone else,’ he said superbly.

Charlie Hurling’s humorous episodes are like that.

As is much of life.

Judi Dench, the food writer, about whom I was beginning to wonder, was asked by Charlie in a provocative fashion on the second night about a very obvious jar of pickles that was sitting on the table in the darkened barn where we dined: she gave, in that husky, soft voice we know so well as belonging to the other Judi Dench, a plain, calm lavatorial description of the contents. Then she said: ‘I was perfectly horrified by you to begin with but I’m not going to have you think I’m a sheltered spinster.’ The following day, Charlie asked Olive Wildish, the textile designer, whether her beloved only daughter had yet developed pubic hair: ‘Do you have pubic hair, Charlie?’ Judi Dench inquired with that silvery exquistion the Nation loves.

I think, on the whole, Judi Dench, ‘food writer’, was a blind. It was the other Judi Dench, to be sure.

Oh dear! I haven’t described the dinner at all, about which there was much fury and which was gloriously allowed its freedom as a  fiasco. Nor the second dinner and how Angus Willis, not simpering at cautious distance as an ordinary tourist would do, made inroads at Viscri, took command of the raw ingredients of the place and made them into something new.

You’ll have to back tomorrow.

Cow-Stall Outdoor Dining Room at Prince Charles' Guesthouse Where Angus Willis's 50th Birthday Dinner Took Place

Wednesday 28th September 2011

I’ve been cut off in Romania, as well as busy, busy, busy – on a horse and cart largely, in Transylvanian forests.

Poor Little Rich Gays are stunning, they really are. Who else would have thought of a 50th birthday in Romania? Angus Willis, the international food writer and stylist, bade me to Viscri, a remote Transylvanian village, where Saxons from Germany lived for hundreds of years, for reasons unknown to me at least.

I travelled over two days, via Budapest (such memories of days there with Anthony Mottram) and gained this deeply challenging environment on Saturday afternoon. Imagine a great sweep of broad dust track (it hasn’t rained for months) with curious low box-like houses ,dating from the Middle Ages, placed side-on to the ‘street’. No other buildings, to speak of, no fountain or attractive square for outdoor gathering. Yet, it can’t have been a poor place, for the houses are large. Perhaps they put everything into the spectacular fortified church at the far end, separated from the village. The general scene is not exactly pretty but rather haunting and strange; quite unlike anywhere else.

But it’s poor now. Some residents fetch water from the well. At night, with darkness total, I was mystified by a tremendous pervasive clattering; peering, I saw bicycles being ridden over the rough dirt road with water churns on trailers rattling behind.

Poor Little Rich Gays had to resist the temptation to the picturesque. I wore stout Prada clucks and my Dries van Noten summer scarf as a dust veil.

Of course one felt grandeur and cruelty.

The raging confusion was that the guest house where I stayed belongs to the Prince of Wales. He’s been there. I was sharing his bathroom.

Well, I’ve set the scene.

Come back later to find out how Poor Little Rich Gays shaped and re-made Viscri, Romania. Also, an explosive encounter with two middle classes, as well as an enchanting ride in a rough horse-drawn cart, such as might have taken Marie Antoinette to the guillotine.

The party, by the way, was: Judi Dench, the food writer, Charlie Hurling, hotelier and bar designer, who thinks of the worst thing to say and says it, his partner, Archie Brahams , who doesn’t, Fern Willis, Angus’ sister, who has a lot to put up with, Merle Barr, head of Social Services, and Olive Wildish, the textile designer.

So much to say about all of them, which you wouldn’t believe.

Prince Charles-Owned Guest House, Viscri

Prince Charles' Actual Bedroom at Viscri Guest House

Prince Charles's Bathroom at Guest House in Viscri

Graph of Graph of Prince Charles Visiting Viscri Fortified Church

My One-Night Stopover Airport Hotel at Budapest, Done in Flame Shades

View from One-Night Stopover Airport Hotel at Budapest

Viscri at Gloaming: Sudden Metropolis for Animals

Viscri Main Drag

Viscri Main Drag at Gloaming

Viscri: Classic House-End Shape

Viscri: Leading Towards Roma Faubourg